All figures are Execution
Times in Seconds - All figures are Execution Times in Seconds
- measured on a Dell Studio XPS with a Core i7 920 2.66GHz processor,
and 9 GBytes 1033MHz DDR3 memory, and running Centos 5.3 Linux
and AMD Phenom II X4 955 processor (3.2 GHz), running CentOS 5.5
respectively. Each figure is the average over at least 10 runs
(many more for some). Measurement error is typically <1%. Green
cells highlight figures within 10% of the fastest. Red cells indicate
figures which are more than 150% of the fastest.

So far as possible, we have used
the compiler switches which give the best overall results. We
have not attempted to tune individual benchmarks, and, in particular
cases, different switch settings may give better results. For
all except LF95, compiler switches were set to generate 64 bit
executables.

The settings used for the Intel and Absoft compilers enable autoparallelization. Autoparallelization settings are not used on any other compilers because we found that they produced no significant performance benefits on this benchmark set.

Thanks are due to Jos Bergervoet
for permission to use his CAPACITA benchmark, to Quetzal Associates
for permission to use their CHANNEL, FATIGUE, GAS_DYN, INDUCT,
PROTEIN and RNFLOW benchmarks, to David Frank for his TEST_FPU
benchmark, and to Ted Addison of McVehil-Monnett Associates for
permission to use AERMOD, an air quality model used by the US
Environmental Protection Agency.

All the benchmarks have been modified
slightly to fit into our benchmarking harness.

The NF benchmark uses "nested
factorization", a little known but very effective iterative
linear solver for huge finite difference matrices. A paper describing
nested factorization, and comparing it to other methods is available
here.

This Benchmark comparison
was produced by Polyhedron Ltd. and this page is reproduced with
permission from Polyhedron
Ltd.